IT as a source of distrust and trust
Ironically, information technology, and especially the Internet, is the single biggest reason that traditional roles and institutions of authority are coming under fire. Consider how many of the various scandals of the past decade – Y2K, Enron, dot.com, the financial meltdown, Climategate, etc. – have had an important IT dimension. All of these debacles share roots in rising IT complexity, bursts of over-enthusiasm, and the limits of both expert and mass-market understanding. For example, the Y2K, financial meltdown and Climategate scandals all highlight the challenges created by computer and information complexity. No one really knew how serious the overall Y2K risk was, and even today experts debate whether the whole thing was largely a false alarm or whether the last-minute efforts of many dedicated IT professionals miraculously but anonymously saved the day. (We think it is more the latter, but the public verdict tends to lean the other way.)
Similarly, both the financial market meltdown and Climategate stories point to the complexity of large-scale computer models that are not just opaque to outsiders, but often bewildering even to their own developers. For the average citizen, the acceptance of the output of these models must inherently be based on trust. But we have painfully learned that insiders can be easily seduced by their own cleverness and that peer review processes can have their own arcane shortcomings. This makes it easy for even the most diligent experts to become over-invested in their own work, increasing the likelihood that conscious or unconscious biases will make computer models say exactly what their developers want them to say. Imagine the damage to our trust in the scientific community should global warming prove to be the biggest false alarm of all.
Additionally, today’s rising societal scepticism toward institutional expertise is reinforced by the way that the Internet, especially Google and Wikipedia, has levelled the overall information playing field. Today, all of us can instantaneously and freely access much the same information as highly paid doctors, lawyers, government officials and media figures. Thus the knowledge gap between the professional expert and the motivated citizen is narrowing, even as the price/wage gap remains wide or even continues to expand. Under such conditions, it is only natural that traditional patterns of consumer deference will erode, and new sources of trust and authority will emerge.
Today, these patterns can be seen most clearly and disruptively in the traditional news media where committed citizens have proved they can effectively and efficiently challenge the expertise of even the New York Times and the BBC. But similar forces are at work within the IT sector. Consider the way that many of us now turn first to Google for help with whatever routine PC or smart phone support we might need. From my own experience, such free community help sites are typically much faster, more effective and more up-to-date than either internal company help desks or the vast customer support sites maintained by market leaders such as Dell, Microsoft and Apple. In both the media and IT support examples, the advantages of the populist/consumerist model greatly outweigh legitimate concerns in areas such as accuracy, amateurism, and the inevitable self-promotion of some community members. In this sense, consumerization/populism is proving to be an important and emerging source of trust.
